I do feel that the inherency issues of institutional racism will only get worse as the overt forms of racism fade away. I don't want to end up in an America that says, "Great, we have a Black President, a lady Vice President and the richest woman in the world is Oprah. We are done with racism." All the while there are still poor schools or immigrants who aren't privi to a better life do to the color of their skin and the language that they speak.

While overt racism may now be less frequent, our tendency to differentiate then generalize from those differences still has important and rather dramatic effects on society. It seems doubtful to me that it will die out by us ignoring it.

According to my grandparents. I guess it's possible they weren't less racist, but they definitely weren't as vocal about their racism.

My children are going to grow up with black cousins. They are going to have access to television and the internet where there will be a mixture of faces. They will have many different races represented in their schools. Everyone thinks I'm naive, but do you honestly believe that our children and grandchildren will be as racist as our parents?The way we end racism is by choosing not to repeat the mistakes of those who came before us.Unless, of course, you believe that racism is a natural human tendency.

The problem is that racism, or at least prejudicial thinking, is a natural human tendency. Given the number of stimuli that the average human must face every day, the mind automatically begins to form stereotypes and prejudices about different things simply in order to comprehend the world quickly enough.

I agree with everything Hammerstein says, but the first paragraph here reminded me of a study that came out a few years back. I pulled this from a quick google search, so it's not the most informative article out there:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Because of the way human brains develop, 6-month-old babies are better at recognizing certain faces than 9-month-old infants, a new study says.

Even more surprising, those 6-month-olds are also better than adults at some face recognition, it contends.

But there's a catch: It is non-human faces that the 6-month-olds excel at recognizing.

In a study detailed in Science magazine, researchers discovered that the 6-month-olds had no problem distinguishing between individual humans or between individual monkeys. But just three months later, at 9 months of age, while babies could still tell the difference between human faces, they couldn't tell one monkey from another.

"Early in development, the brain is open to any face," said Charles Nelson, a child psychologist at the University of Minnesota. But apparently sometime between 6 and 9 months of age, he said, babies' brains "key in" on the fact that human faces are the ones they need to pay attention to.

As people get older, they get better and better at detecting the subtle differences in the faces they see a lot: human faces, Nelson said. But at the same time, they lose the ability to detect differences in things they don't see a lot.

It's a phenomenon called "cognitive narrowing."

This phenomenon provides an interesting lens through which to view some of the more irrational aspects of human sociology, both in terms of cognitive bias and in perpetuating stereotypes.